Daily Search Forum Recap: December 30, 2009

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Can You Optimize for Stop Words in Search Results?
A HighRankings Forum thread asks an interesting SEO question. The question is, can you optimize for stop words in Google or other search engines? His particular example seems flawed, in that he is calling IT a stop word and it is stopping him for optimizing for the query [it companies]. However, when I search for [it companies] in Google, it does seem to figure out, IT here stands for information technology. But in general, is

Tracking Back Links: How Do You Do It?
There is an excellent thread at HighRankings Forum on the topic of how you should or could track one's link building efforts. The topic in this thread started off about how to track links accrued due to a link building contest. However, the topic moved into how to track link building efforts for a site in general. Many are of the opinion that no tool can accurately measure the links acquired over time. Google Webmaster

Reporting Google Maps Business Listing Spam to Google
Mike reported how Google likes you to report Google Maps business listing spam to them. Google Maps, especially the local business center, has been a target for spammers in the past couple years. Google has tried numerous ways to have people report spam to them. I guess recently, Google changed it to ask people to report a problem with the business listing via the "report a problem" link either on the map itself or on

Google Promises to Fix Google Webmaster Tools API Verification Process in January
Those of you who are patiently waiting for Google to fix the verification tag in the Webmaster Tools API for the past two months just has to wait a bit longer. In short, those who are tying to use the Webmaster Tools API to verify their sites with Google Webmaster Tools are running into issues. The reason is, the meta tag being generated via the API is wrong and needs to be updated by Google.

Google 302 Hijack Attempt on CNN for Blackberry News?
Conduct a search for [blackberry news] in Google and see page two and three of the results. The results are inundated with weird results from random domains that redirect to CNN.com. The redirect is a 302 redirect and the header looks like: HTTP/1.1 302 => Date => Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:58:52 GMT Content-Type => text/html Connection => close Server => Apache Content-Length => 0 Location => http://cnn.com Here is a picture of just two